A chance feature in Lincolnshire Life in 1968 led me on my Lincolnshire Road Car Company staff bus-pass to another remote country house not far from Cadeby Hall – the Italianate fantasy of Grainsby Hall, which clearly bemused Henry Thorold in his Lincolnshire Houses book and was dismissed by Pevsner as “crazy”.
I didn’t think the place at all crazy; in fact, I rather liked it.
It was wilfully asymmetrical, with a tower over the entrance
portico and lots of stark plate glass windows which, in 1968, were largely
intact.
When I revisited by car a couple of years later, the windows
– and, I think, the door – had gone and I was free to take pictures of the shattered
and clearly dangerous interior, which included a grand octagonal drawing room
and a massive galleried staircase hall.
This Italianate confectionery dated from 1860 and was built around an earlier, eighteenth-century house.
The Haigh family has owned the Grainsby estate since it came
to William Haigh of Norland, Halifax, by marriage in 1827. In the nineteenth century the family owned
the Garden Street Mill in Halifax.
The Hall must have been a splendid place but it was occupied
by the military during World War II and fell into disrepair.
For a time it was used as a grain store, until it became
dangerous.
It quickly became beyond saving, even between the dates of
my two visits, and it was duly demolished in February 1973.
The c1820 stable block remains and is listed Grade II.
I recently read Henry Thorold’s Lincolnshire Houses (Michael Russell 1999), an extensive compendium of domestic buildings in a huge, empty, varied county, ranging from great palaces like Grimsthorpe and Harlaxton to tiny rectories and houses hidden in the Wolds, quite a few of which were built, bought or inherited by Henry Thorold’s relatives over the past four centuries.
It reminded me of when I first got to know Lincolnshire in the late 1960s, working on the buses in Skegness during university vacations, and travelling the county on a quarter-fare staff bus pass.
In those days there was, of course, no easy way to find information about historic buildings in the county, except the local library, the 1964 first edition Pevsner for Lincolnshire, and the periodical Lincolnshire Life.
A few brief paragraphs in Lincolnshire Life alerted me to Cadeby Hall, up in the Wolds near Ludborough, on the way to Grimsby.
Even the later 1979 Pevsner gives the place short shrift – “an
early C18 stone front of seven bays and 2½ storeys…inside, a good staircase…at
the time of writing derelict…”
The inimitable Henry Thorold calls it “the Sleeping Beauty house par excellence”.
When I first saw it in 1968 it was already derelict, with a ‘Danger Keep Out’ notice on the front door. At the rear a service wing which I then thought to be Victorian but now know to have been eighteenth century had been demolished. I didn’t attempt to enter.
The Hall is easily visible from a public footpath but it’s not a
place you’d come across on your way anywhere.
I found it again driving round north Lincolnshire in 1982, by
which time it had been tidied up and was apparently in use as a shooting lodge.
Now, by the magic of Google, I discover that it has been
splendidly refurbished with, on the site of the demolished rear wing, a
tactful, decorous neo-Georgian extension:
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4163107.
I’ve no idea who lives there: they’re lucky, and we’re lucky that they’ve saved a hidden gem.
In the German city of Wuppertal, birthplace of aspirin, the town hall, the splendid Rathaus, was opened in 1900 by Kaiser Wilhelm II on the same day as the celebrated Schwebebahn.
In front of it stands the jolly Jubiläumsbrunnen fountain, sculpted by the Düsseldorf sculptor Leo
Müsch (1846-1911) to celebrate the silver jubilee of the Elberfelder Verschönerungsverein [the Elberfeld beautification club].
Müsch’s design, 11.5 metres high, carved in red sandstone,
is a glorious riot of sea gods and monsters, tritons and mermaids, topped by
the figure of Neptune.
Quite what this maritime composition has to do with a
landlocked industrial valley in the heart of North Rhine-Westphalia escapes me.
According to the English translation of the Wikipedia
article, the inauguration in 1901 caused a stir because “the figures were too
much male distinctive”.
The “form of the anatomically correctly modelled pubic region”
caused great offence, and an unknown person or persons took a hammer and chisel
to the sculpture.
The community was divided, and strong positions were taken.
The local writer Walter Bloem (1868-1951) wrote a four-act drama The Jubilee Fountain which provoked his pastor to ask him to leave the church.
The City Council eventually resolved to restore Neptune’s
masculinity, after a vehement debate about acanthus leaves.
Nevertheless, as the English translation remarks, “the scars
are still visible today”.
I didn’t notice anything outstanding when I photographed the
fountain.
When I looked closer at my photograph I recalled the lady who, when annoyed by a flasher in a Marks & Spencer elevator, remarked “Is that it, then?”
Rochdale Town Hall: corbel portrait of William Henry Crossland (1823-1909)Rochdale Town Hall: corbel portrait of George Leach Ashworth (1823-1873)
When I planned my 2019 Manchester’s Heritage tour I
knew I couldn’t include Manchester’s magnificent Town Hall because it’s closed
for a five-year refurbishment.
However, there’s more to “Manchester” than Manchester, and a
tram-ride away from St Peter’s Square terminates close to Rochdale
Town Hall, smaller, but hardly less magnificent than Manchester Town Hall,
with a host of entertaining stories attached to it.
No sooner had the new borough of Rochdale elected its first
Corporation in 1856 than a sub-committee began work to provide a suitable town
hall.
The committee chairman, George Leach Ashworth (1823-1873), was
originally unenthusiastic about the project.
When the Church Commissioners eventually agreed a price for land
alongside the River Roch, Ashworth tried unsuccessfully to limit the budget to
£15,000, on the grounds that it was “…only requisite that we should have a
handsome frontage.”
An architectural competition, stipulating a budget limit of
£20,000, was won by the Leeds architect William Henry Crossland (1823-1909), a
pupil of the great Gothic Revival architect, George Gilbert Scott.
Despite the budget-limit, Crossland’s initial estimate of £26,510
was repeatedly augmented at the Corporation’s request. The Great Hall was increased in area to 90ft
× 56ft, and the 240ft tower was embellished with an octagonal lantern decorated
with carved trumpeting angels and surmounted by a spire supporting a solid wood
statue of St George and the Dragon by Earp of London.
Several ancient buildings were demolished and the River Roch
culverted to provide the impressive seventy-foot-wide esplanade.
Crossland provided grand public rooms, the Mayor’s suite,
administrative offices and, initially, the public library, and the west wing
was given to the fire and police departments, together with a court room and
ancillary cells and a residence for the Chief Constable.
The building is faced with millstone grit from Blackstone Edge, generously
dignified by sculpture. The fire
department, for example, was identified with the phoenix, the salamander, the
owl (symbolising watchfulness) and the dog (indicating alarm-raising). For reasons that are unrecorded, a buttress
on the porte-cochère is ornamented
with a winged pig.
The interior was no less extravagant. The entrance hall, designed as a
wool-merchants’ exchange though never used as such, has a heraldic Minton tiled
floor. The windows of the vast staircase
are filled with lancet windows showing the arms of the counties, towns and
ports with which Rochdale traded, together with the technological marvels of
the day – the steamship, the railway and the telegraph.
The Great Hall is lit by windows depicting every English monarch
from William the Conqueror to William IV, together with Oliver Cromwell as Lord
Protector; Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert are portrayed in the rose windows at each end. On the eastern wall is Henry Holiday’s fresco
of the signing of Magna Carta, and the hammer beams support carved angels, from
which originally hung chandeliers.
The magistrates’ retiring room has depictions of nine English
figures associated with lawmaking and the English constitution. The Mayor’s Parlour is decorated with the
Garden of the Hesperides, the four seasons, the months of the year and a group
of musicians. The committee room frieze
shows animals associated, in one way or another, with primitive clothing, and the
walls of the arched council chamber are decorated with a ground of bursting
cotton pods and teasels, and panels showing weaving, spinning, textile-printing,
the plants used in textile manufacture and the inventions of Kay, Cartwright,
Hargreaves and Crompton.
In No 3 Committee Room the corbels show the supporters of the Town
Hall scheme, deftly described by Colin Cunningham, in Victorian and
Edwardian Town Halls (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1981): “…the architect wearily toying with a pair of
dividers and the mayor clutching his new town hall”.
By the time the Town Hall was completed in 1871, the final cost
was £154,755 9s 11d, and the Mayor, G L Ashworth, remarked that “we cannot have
beauty without paying for it.”
Dry rot in the spire was being treated when the tower burnt down in 1883. One local legend declares that the fire was deliberately started by the workmen, who feared for their own safety as they took apart the rotten structure. Another legend has it that the Rochdale fire brigade, which was stationed at the back of the building, was beaten to the blaze by the Oldham brigade.
The more modest but still impressive 191ft-high replacement was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, the architect of Manchester Town Hall, and completed in 1887.
The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, including a section on Rochdale, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.
Carbrook Hall, Sheffield: Oak Room fireplace overmantel
Every old building needs to earn its keep.
It’s pointless to argue for the retention of a historic
building, listed or not, without the means to maintain it into the future.
Seventeenth-century Carbrook Hall, for many years a pub in the heart of Sheffield’s industrial east end, closed in 2017, yet another casualty of the inexorable decline of the British public house, and a year later suffered an arson attack that was fortunately arrested before the entire building went up in smoke.
Local historians and CAMRA members hoped it would reopen as
licensed premises, but its new owner, the property developer Sean Fogg, applied
lateral thinking and leased it to the coffee chain, Starbucks.
Mr Fogg spent £700,000, assisted by Starbucks’ contribution
of £400,000, to restore the remaining stone wing of what was a much larger
house, enhancing its surroundings, replacing a nondescript twentieth-century
service block with a tactful 21st-century drive-in facility, and bringing the
three exceptional historic interiors to a high state of preservation.
Walking into the building is a time-warp, because the
coffee-shop counter, located where the pub bar used to be, is an
up-to-the-minute skinny-latte-and-panini experience.
Turn left and enter the Oak Room, though, and despite the
bright lighting and modern furniture, you’re surrounded by high-quality
panelled walls and a crisp plaster ceiling that witnessed the discussions about
besieging Sheffield Castle during the Civil War nearly four centuries ago.
This was the home of the Puritan Bright family, in those days lost in the spacious meadowlands of the Lower Don Valley. It’s possible that their interior decorators were the craftsmen who worked on the Little Keep at Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire. It’s the oldest building in the valley and has seen no end of changes.
At the opposite end of the ground floor is an ancient
kitchen with stone stoves and a bread oven.
A second panelled room upstairs is not yet completed, but
will be dedicated to public use when fully restored.
The restoration is meticulous, though the conservationists were disturbed to find that the ancient oak had been peppered by stray darts around the site of the dart board.
The reopening of Carbrook Hall is a boost to public awareness of the area’s historic heritage.
I’m pleased that we can now take the heritage Bus Rides Round Attercliffe to the oldest building in the Lower Don Valley.
The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2017 ‘Sheffield’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.
English Institute of Sport Sheffield: A Bus Ride Round Attercliffe visit, April 7th 2019
On the popular Bus Ride Round Attercliffe trips that I run in conjunction with South Yorkshire Transport Museum, we regularly make a stop at the English Institute of Sport Sheffield, to show that the Lower Don Valley has begun an astonishing transformation since the demise of the heavy steel industry in the early 1980s.
Designed by FaulknerBrowns Architects, the Institute opened in December 2003, funded by Sport England and managed by Sheffield City Trust (successor to SIV Ltd), a Health and Well Being Charity. It’s newer than the Arena and the demolished Don Valley Stadium which were built for the 1991 World Student Games. It’s even newer than the nearby IceSheffield, designed by the Building Design Partnership and opened in May 2003.
It has and continues to provide training facilities for an impressive array of champions, including Sheffield-born heptathlete Jessica Ennis-Hill, boxers Anthony Joshua and Nicola Adams and the Paralympian table-tennis player Will Bailey, as well as sixty local sports clubs and seventy thousand local school children a year.
The initial cost of the facility was £28 million, and the Institute aims to balance usage at 90% local community to 10% elite athletes.
A quick guided tour shows Bus Ride passengers, many of whom grew up in Attercliffe after the Second World War, the facilities for boxing, wheelchair basketball and – most impressive of all – the huge 200-metre indoor running track.
Though we’ve had to pause individually-booked Bus Rides because of increasing bus-hire costs I’m looking forward to offering heritage bus-ride experiences to groups from outside Sheffield in future, and in the ‘Sheffield’s Industrial Heritage’ tour I plan to take people first of all to Magna, to see the hot, dark, dangerous spaces where workers spent their days in the steel industry and then, for contrast, to EISS to experience the light, clean, air-conditioned spaces in which people exercise and perfect their sport skills in the twenty-first century.
The Valley has come a long way within a lifetime, and I want to present this in as dramatic a way as possible.
The ‘Sheffield’s Industrial Heritage’ bus tours for groups are arranged as bespoke itineraries, and Magna and EISS may not always be available because of major events taking place. On occasions the Bus Ride may visit other equivalent buildings in the city centre or the Lower Don Valley. For further details please click here.
Former Great Northern Railway: Nottingham London Road Low Level Station
Britain’s railways are notoriously ill-organised, thanks to the Major government’s privatisation process of 1994-97, in which operating companies hired trains from rolling-stock companies and ran them on track owned by a nationalised entity. (Sir John Major himself suggested simply reviving the “Big Four” grouping of 1922, which on reflection doesn’t seem such a bad idea compared with what we’re now stuck with.)
The early railway builders quickly dismissed the idea of having independent operators running on railway lines, like the eighteenth-century turnpikes, and Gladstone’s Railway Regulation Act of 1844 provided for the possibility of nationalising the railway system even as it was being built.
But the Victorians put their faith in competition, and Britain’s railways grew willy-nilly, leading to a confusion as profound as the 21st-century British rail system.
This is evident in Nottingham, where throughout the nineteenth century two competing railway companies, the Midland and the Great Northern, ran from separate stations a short distance away from each other, on Station Street and London Road respectively.
In 1879, under the auspices of the ponderously named Great Northern & London & North Western Joint Railway, a third company, the London & North Western Railway, began running passenger services into London Road Station and delivering goods to a purpose-built station at Sneinton.
Then in 1900, a fourth company, the Great Central, built the magnificent Victoria Station, which it shared with the Great Northern, in a cutting in the centre of town.
The Great Northern built a duplicate London Road station, which they named High Level, to distinguish it from their original station, latterly Low Level, which the L&NWR continued to use for their services to Market Harborough via Saxondale Junction, Bottesford and Melton Mowbray.
This absurdity continued until 1944, when the former L&NWR trains were diverted into Nottingham Midland and the Low Level station became a goods depot.
Much of this has since been swept away. There is now only one station in Nottingham, the former Midland, though it serves trains run by three separate modern operating companies. The lines into Low Level were taken up in the 1970s, and after a fire in 1996 Thomas Chambers Hine’s imposing 1857 building was restored and refurbished as a health club.
But it’s a mistake to think that the way we run British railways in the 21st century is any more bizarre than the travellers’ chaos that the Victorians created.
The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2018 ‘Waterways and Railways of the East Midlands’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.
Former Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast Railway: Fledborough Viaduct
Of all the grandiose railway schemes proposed in Britain in the nineteenth century, few match the audacity of the Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast Railway.
Its original Act of 1891 authorised a 170-mile line from Warrington in Lancashire to Sutton-on-Sea in Lincolnshire, together with extensive docks at each terminus, crossing the paths of every major main line to the North in the hope of carrying substantial traffic east and west from new collieries opening on the concealed coalfield in east Nottinghamshire.
In fact, only the section between Chesterfield and Lincoln was built. It opened in 1897, along with a branch to Sheffield in 1900. It was sold to the Great Central Railway in 1907 without ever paying a dividend.
Driven by Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire coal-owners’ desire to exploit their untapped mineral resources, it would have involved audacious engineering over the Peak District, including a three-hundred-foot viaduct topping the existing sixty-three-foot viaduct at Monsal Dale.
Most of what was built has disappeared – the main station at Chesterfield Market Place, the sixty-three-foot high viaduct at Horn’s Bridge on the outskirts of Chesterfield, which crossed two rivers, two roads and two railway lines within a couple of hundred yards, and the notoriously unstable 2,642-yard Bolsover Tunnel.
The line west of Langwith Junction closed in 1951 when Bolsover Tunnel became impassable, and passenger services on the remaining section ended in 1955. Freight traffic over parts of the route continued until 2015.
The only part of the line still in use is now Network Rail’s High Marnham Test Track, reopened in 2009 between Thoresby Colliery Junction and Dukeries Junction. Beyond that, almost all the way to the end of the LD&ECR at Pyewipe Junction, the trackbed is now part of the National Cycle Network.
And on that stretch is the only surviving substantial engineering monument of this bravura piece of railway building – Fledborough Viaduct, 59 brick arches and four girder spans, in total just over half a mile long, crossing the River Trent and its wide flood plain at no great height.
There had to be a viaduct at this point because of the Trent’s propensity to flood. An embankment would have acted as a dam and caused serious flooding upstream.
On the west bank of the Trent High Marnham Power Station opened in 1962 and the railway supplied it with coal until a derailment in 1980 led to a temporary closure that became permanent.
The power station in turn closed in 2003 and was finally demolished in 2012.
The cycle trail is the best way to appreciate the scale of Fledborough Viaduct, which is difficult to see from any public road.
The best view of the Viaduct is from the river path at High Marnham, where the Brownlow Arms [https://www.thebrownlowarms.co.uk] marks the existence of a now-vanished ferry.
The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2018 ‘Waterways and Railways of the East Midlands’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.
Our Lady Star of the Sea RC Church, Watson’s Bay, Sydney, Australia
On my previous visits to Sydney, in 2010 and 2011, I made no use whatever of its extensive ferry system, an omission as grievous as my failure, on my first visit to Rome, to visit the Vatican.
At leisure on my 2017 visit, I took the first opportunity to catch a bus to Circular Quay and hop on the first ferry out, which took me to Watson’s Bay, a headland with spectacular views and a long history of maritime and military significance.
There I had a cup of tea at Doyle’s on the Wharf [https://www.doyles.com.au], one half of a celebrated fish restaurant, along with Doyle’s on the Beach (established 1885). It was too early for fish and chips, but I’d gladly return another time, especially if it was an appropriate occasion for the more formal Doyle’s on the Beach which has tablecloths.
My exploration led me along the cliff-top path known as The Gap. The Gap was and still is a notorious suicide spot, though the cliff edge is strongly fenced. There is a memorial to Don Ritchie OAM (1925-2012), a local resident who repeatedly took in and tried to help people in despair at The Gap.
He was a World War II navy veteran who after the war worked as an insurance salesman. He was adept at spotting distressed individuals on the cliffs and by making a simple approach such as “Can I help you in some way?”, and inviting them home for a cup of tea, he saved the lives of 164 potential suicides. As he put it, “You can’t just sit there and watch them.”
Another rescuer of more than thirty potential suicides was Rexie, a German Shepherd bitch owned by the proprietor of the Gap Tavern in the 1960s. She had the ability to recognise potential suicides and would bark to attract assistance.
I tried to locate the former tram-track, where first-generation Sydney trams plunged down hairpin bends to reach their terminus, and though I think I found it in part, it was so overgrown as to be unrecognisable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLjwCFtqKgc.
When I emerged on to Old South Head Road and headed back downhill towards the bus terminus I came upon St Peter’s Anglican Church, a tiny little cell designed by Edward Blacket in 1864 and the more remarkable Our Lady Star of the Sea RC Church, a 1910 exterior with a much later spire but no tower, and a beautiful 1966 interior, with a five-light east window in the form of the Southern Cross constellation.
The bus that I caught back into town took me a different way, so that I discovered the stunning views to be had of central Sydney, with the Harbour Bridge in the distance, from an area called Dover Heights, before the bus dropped down into Bondi Beach, the classic Australian version of seaside.
St Peter’s Parish Church, Clayworth, Nottinghamshire: Traquair murals
When I visited Drakeholes to photograph the canal tunnel my curiosity was piqued by brown tourist road-signs marked ‘Traquair murals’ because I didn’t recognise the name.
That’s because I’m neither Scots nor a fine-art aficionado.
Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852-1936) was Irish by birth, an illustrator, jewellery designer and embroiderer whose mural painting was mostly done in Scotland. Only two of her mural schemes are in England, and one of them is a couple of miles down the road from Drakeholes, at St Peter’s Church, Clayworth.
The church itself is interesting – built in the twelfth century, restored in 1874-5 by John Oldrid Scott, Grade I listed.
Phoebe Anna Traquair, who married a Scots palaeontologist, was a leading figure in the Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland, and the first woman to be elected to the Royal Scottish Academy,
The Traquair Murals dated from 1904-5, and were restored by Elizabeth Hirst in 1996. They were given by Lady D’Arcy Godolphin Osborne as a thank-offering for the safe return from the Boer War of her son, Captain Joseph Frederick Laycock DSO (1867-1952), of Wiseton Hall. As Joe Laycock he competed for Britain in the 1908 Olympics with his friend the 2nd Duke of Westminster.
The murals cover all four walls of the chancel, illustrating in rich colours and gilding a comprehensive figurative scheme and incorporating portraits of local children: several of the figures on the north wall, bringing gifts to the Christ Child, are members of the Laycock family, and some of the adjacent Angel Choir are actual choristers, including Tony Otter (1896-1986), who was Suffragan Bishop of Grantham from 1949 to 1965, and his cousin Jack Martin.
The murals are claimed, collectively, to be the largest artwork in eastern England.
Size doesn’t matter. They’re beautiful, and worth seeking out in this gem of a church, set in the countryside between Bawtry and Gainsborough in north Nottinghamshire.
Clayworth stands on the B1403 road south of Gringley-on-the-Hill. St Peter’s Church is open daily.
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